You, Me and The Movies

by Fiona Collins

  ‘No,’ I say – I would add, I appreciate it, but I don’t. We walk back to the ward without speaking. As we sit down on two chairs at the same side of Mac’s bed, where he lies awake and unblinking, Lloyd pulls an envelope from his coat pocket.

  ‘Dad, look, here are your grandchildren.’ I’m glad he is focusing on the future now, not the past. Showing his dad his legacy. There are four grandchildren, from what I can make out from the photos, all with unusual names – Lloyd doesn’t let me see. Mac’s face lights up as he sees their faces, as much as it can, and I smile as I am so, so happy for him, but – despite me trying to hang on to it – my heart can’t help but break at the thought that my father’s face will never light up again at the sight of Julian, his only grandson. I let tears fill my eyes and I’m reminded of my first night on Ward 10, when I witnessed the patients with their children, and their grandchildren – families whole and not ripped apart. Oh dear, I think, shaking my head to banish my tears; this is turning out to be quite the emotional rollercoaster of a day for me, one I had no idea of when I strapped myself into James’s car this morning. I’m glad he’s not here to see me making an exhibition of myself.

  Lloyd goes through the photographs twice; at the end he flicks the stack of them like it’s a flicker book from the pre-dawn days of cinema, those ones with the stick people. Mac will appreciate that, I think, although he looks tired. Then Lloyd puts the photos back in his wallet and Mac immediately closes his eyes. My tears now gone, I am just wondering why Lloyd has come back, considering everything, considering how far he was from his father, considering he had decided to never talk to him again, when Lloyd leans towards me and says, in an almost inaudible whisper, ‘I’ve spent a long time trying to distance myself from him. Moving to Australia was about as far away as I could get. Yet here I am. The pull of family; it always brings you back eventually. It’s really quite annoying, actually, but there you go.’

  He shrugs those shiny black padded shoulders and gives me another smile and he looks just like Mac again. They both ripped their family apart – Mac and Lloyd – I hope their reunion now is not too late to heal something for each of them. Funny, I think, how the day they reunited is the day my mother and I severed for good, but Lloyd is not quite right – the pull of family doesn’t always bring you back; sometimes, it releases you, like a smooth pebble from a catapult.

  ‘Is there a chance he’ll get out of this?’ Lloyd asks.

  He makes it sound like a funk, like something self-inflicted almost. Or a tunnel Mac simply has to walk through to reach the other side.

  ‘I don’t know. You’ll have to ask the nurses.’

  ‘And the not-being-able-to-speak thing?’

  ‘No one seems to know, I’m afraid. How long are you back for?’

  ‘A week or so. I’m staying with a mate. On their sofa. No biggie.’

  He looks older, but he is young for his age, I decide. A kind of eternal teenager. I bet he still rides a skateboard and surfs as well as scuba dives. ‘OK, and then you’ll just go back?’

  The whispering is becoming almost comedic now. ‘I live in Oz, my wife and kids are there. I have to go back.’ I wonder how long Mac will be in hospital. It’s been over three weeks now – how many more, or will it be months? Will they move him somewhere else? Will it be close by so I can still visit? Will he get better and walk out of here before that happens?

  Lloyd stands up. ‘I’m going to go now,’ he says, in a normal voice. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow. Bye, Dad,’ he shouts, spoiling it.

  Mac’s eyes slowly open and Lloyd leaves the ward, a rustling caterpillar in that bloody coat.

  I sit back down on my chair.

  ‘Good, eh?’ I smile, taking Mac’s hand and giving it a gentle squeeze.

  A single tear slips out of the corner of his eye and travels down the side of his face to a slightly stubbly jaw. I hope the nurses will give him a shave again tomorrow. I grab a tissue and catch the tear.

  ‘He says he’ll come back tomorrow. There’s a few of us now, eh? We’ll have to queue up. You still want me to come?’ I am doubtful, suddenly. Does Mac want me coming to see him every day? Does he care if I am here or not? Has he just been happy to see a friendly face, any friendly face? Has he just been mentioning the movies because he could, because it is the most economical way to communicate with me, in a fit of convenient nostalgia? The girl he once loved. Once. Perhaps that’s all it is; I have been proved unlovable time and time again by Christian, after all. Mac’s simply in Remembrance of Things Past mode, like Proust and the bloody madeleines, that’s all. My self-doubt attacks me with beady claws, ripping at any feeling I have a right to be here. How easy it is to slip back.

  ‘Do you still want me to come?’ I ask him again.

  Mac looks at me and his dry lips part into a smile. It takes a long time for him to get his words out but when he does they mean everything.

  ‘Depends on the pie.’

  THEN

  Chapter 23: The Way We Were

  It was my favourite moment in The Way We Were, the moment Katie (Barbra Streisand) gets an unexpected call from the delicious Hubbell (Robert Redford), at work – after not hearing from him for ages – asking her if he can stay on her couch for the night. Having told Hubbell to let himself in, she frantically shops for dinner and wine and flowers and treats for an evening in together – because she is utterly in love with him – but as she approaches her apartment he is walking down the road away from it, his hands in his pockets. She calls him, dashes across the street; protests, gabbling, her words tumbling over one another – that he absolutely can’t go as she has bought all this stuff: the steaks, the baked potatoes, the salad, the pie … There is a wonderful pause and Hubbell’s eyes flick from left to right and he looks down at the bags and back up to Katie and he asks her what kind of pie it is.

  I loved that scene. I loved the movie. Mac said he’d seen The Way We Were a million times – it was not on The List; he wasn’t planning to teach it on his course – but I said he’d never seen it with me. I put it on my own list. As we watched it, on video in Mac’s bedroom, me with my legs across his and he with his glasses on, annoyingly marking some essays whilst looking up for all the good bits, I pondered if the movies Mac and I watched made our affair seem more romantic. If I was living through them, seeing myself in them, taking the lead role in our own love story, was that making things more intense? Or was it our affair that made the movies we saw together more meaningful; infusing them with reflected passion and the feeling they had been created just for us? It was hard to tell.

  The Way We Were was just heaven. As we watched, I was pretty much open-mouthed, throughout, at Robert Redford’s beauty. I mean, Mac was beautiful, in his own way, but then there’s subliminal. In his white uniform, drunk and asleep at the end of that bar, Hubbell was just irresistible; you couldn’t take your eyes off him – anyone watching felt the same as Katie, surely? I’d seen this film with my mother who had declared it a crock of shit. She was jealous because she’d never experienced anything like it – not in her marriage or any of her affairs. That real kind of love, that beauty, that truth. All her encounters were grubby and fleeting, or disappointing to her, in the case of my dad. They were her searching for an illusion. Searching for a self that didn’t exist.

  Hubbell could never disappoint anyone, that’s the point of him. To me, anyway. When Hubbell asks her about the pie, I loved how Katie is not afraid to show her desperation, how happy she is he’ll stay and have dinner with her, signalled by a cheeky, almost childish, smile and a kind of ecstatic bob, in the street – her arms full of flowers and grocery bags. Mac looked up for that bit and we both smiled. After the movie finished I asked him if he was going to stop marking essays now and could we go out somewhere, maybe, and he looked at me lazily and said, ‘Depends on the pie.’

  Was it sometime before London, sometime after the trip to the pool, when Mac and I saw The Way We Were? It was definitely when things were as romantic be
tween us as they were between Katie and Hubbell, at least at the beginning of the movie. I didn’t like the last scene – I didn’t like that she couldn’t have Hubbell, in the end. That they weren’t right, that their relationship was doomed from the start. I wanted a happy ending, but sometimes people don’t get one.

  Mac and I didn’t. After I saw Helen coming out of the supermarket I went in and, on devastated automatic pilot, where I kept dropping my purse and almost knocked over a half-hearted pyramid display of kidney beans, bought chocolate digestives, a large pack of salt and vinegar crisps and a giant, much-needed bottle of hock. I walked like a zombie to the hitching point, my head down, praying I wouldn’t see anyone I knew. Someone I knew picked me up in a green car. I actually laughed at some of their jokes; I pretended to enjoy their prog rock mix tape. I made it home to the Slug House. Becky wasn’t there, but the other girls were in the fire-hazard kitchen, burning meatballs in a wok. I went straight to my room and sat with the door closed all day, until the hock was gone. I alternated between swigging straight from the bottle and lying on my bed staring at the ceiling.

  At 7 p.m. I put on some bright red lipstick and my jeans shorts, hitched back to campus and headed to the students’ union where I downed three snakebites and black and flailed around on the dance floor to the Communards. ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’, Jimmy Somerville sang, he couldn’t survive otherwise, you know, and I realized I couldn’t either, but this was the way I was being left by Mac. Because of a pregnant Helen with a tight smile and Roman sandals.

  Emotions got the better of me. I made it to the ladies’ loos and sobbed wretchedly in a cubicle with trails of loo roll criss-crossing the floor. I couldn’t compete with this; Helen being pregnant was insurmountable. She had Mac’s child growing inside her; my insides had been viciously ripped from me and thrown to the ground. I was empty, I was desolate; I was abandoned. I had lost him. I had lost Mac.

  I sobbed and remembered another line I had adored from The Way We Were. It was an entreaty, from Barbra Streisand to Robert Redford, something like Hubbell never finding anyone as good as Katie, who would believe in him and love him as much as she did. It had been true for me and Mac. I had never believed in someone so much or loved someone so much, and he felt the same way about me. He’d told me so, hadn’t he? He’d told me only last night he believed in me; in that London club he’d told me he loved me and he’d never felt this way about anyone before. So why, why did Helen, pregnant fucking Helen, have to come along and spoil everything?

  I didn’t care that one of the white tissue trails was gleefully clinging to the back of my plimsoll as I staggered out, tears still wet on my cheeks, pain pulsating through my body. When someone laughingly pointed out my trailing glory to me – a blurry looming balloon with crescent-thin eyebrows and brown lip liner – I nearly punched them in the face. What did it matter? What did anything matter? It was over. It was all over. No more storms in a white bed, dodging cracker crumbs and listening to the branch at the window – tap tap tap – no more screening room and black-and-white movies and stars long dead. No more cowboy music and delicious Mac–Arden banter that made my heart soar like a bird. I didn’t want a Bigger Love, to go on ‘out there’ to live my brilliant, fabulous future. Like Mac, I wanted to be institutionalized, in the four walls of his room and preferably for ever. I didn’t want a future if he wasn’t in it. I didn’t want anything except him and going back to the way we were.

  I lurched outside into the sticky air and headed, like a homing pigeon, to Mac’s room. I knew she might be there but I didn’t care. She should not have come here! To our place! But as I swayed round the last corner to Mac’s building, he was coming down the little path from it. Sauntering almost. Looking so amazingly calm and unbothered by this seismic shift in everything, I could have screamed. I could have rushed up to him pulling out my hair and thrashing around and wailing. Instead, I shouted, ‘Mac!’ and he started and saw me and I marched up to him.

  ‘She’s pregnant.’

  ‘Who’s pregnant?’ Mac took me by the wrist, to steady me, I suppose, but I took it as an infliction, an intent to burn, and shook off his hand.

  ‘Oh, come on! Your wife.’ I was aware I was spitting my words. I was aware I was drunk and deranged, but I didn’t care.

  ‘Oh.’ Mac never just said ‘oh’. He always said important things, things of weight, funny things. Why the fuck was he saying ‘oh’?

  ‘Yes, oh. I’ve seen her. I’ve seen her and she’s pregnant.’ I was slurring so badly it was terrible but not as terrible as I felt. I had never felt so bad.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Mac rubbed at his face and looked behind him as though she might suddenly appear. With her tiger stripe and her baby belly. I hated her.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to do anything!’ I said. I was not sure what I meant. What could I have done? Stormed into his little flat? Surprised her over cheese and biscuits and a glass of weak orange squash? Told her who I was? And then what? She was his wife and she was pregnant; I was just some student Mac was having sex with. ‘Will you leave her for me?’ I asked, knowing he wouldn’t. He was being supplied with his water baby. He was having all those lost children replaced. And he had known about this pregnancy for months but he had never told me.

  Mac looked at me, his eyes saying everything and nothing.

  ‘I won’t leave her,’ said Mac. ‘I can’t. We’ve wanted it for so long.’

  The ‘we’ sliced into me like a big, steel, glittering knife. ‘Big of you,’ I slurred.

  ‘It’s a boy,’ said Mac, as if that would make a difference to me. What would I care? ‘We went for a private scan. We’ve been having lots of scans, actually. The baby is a boy.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ I said. ‘Congratulations.’ He was having his lost boy come back to him at last, his little brother, almost. Joy, finally. ‘Were you ever going to leave her for me?’

  ‘You never asked me to.’ He grooved a finger at his forehead, through his fringe. Why was he being so pathetic? So un-Mac? Where was my brilliant, charismatic man? My firebrand?

  ‘Of course I didn’t!’ I cried. ‘I didn’t care about her! She was no threat to me!’ I was the vampy bit on the side, I thought, the one with all the power – full to the brim with it; she barely crossed my mind. That’s why he liked me, because while I was demanding everything of him I asked for nothing. ‘Were you going to tell me? About the baby?’

  ‘I was stalling.’ He attempted a grin. He looked sheepish, like a little boy. It was a look of his I’d loved so often. Now it made me want to knock him clean to the floor, like I was one of his fucking cowboy heroes in a fucking saloon bar – doors swinging, chairs flying, pistols smoking. ‘I didn’t want to; I didn’t want us to end.’

  ‘You said you loved me.’ I hated him. Now I knew he was slipping away I loved him more than ever.

  ‘Oh God, Arden, I do love you. I love you, Arden.’ He tried to take both my hands; I slapped his away with force, hoping it stung like hell. ‘I’m sorry she’s here, I’m sorry you’ve seen her.’

  ‘Because otherwise you would have got away with it?’ He was a moron. He was a fucking joke. He was a liar and an utter, utter coward.

  ‘No, I’m just sorry. It’s been killing me, all this lying. How I’ve betrayed Helen, how I’ve loved you so much but couldn’t tell you. How I’ve had to keep everything going.’

  ‘Keep everything going? What, like spinning plates? I’m not a plate, Mac!’

  ‘Could you please keep your voice down?’

  ‘Why? Because she might hear?’ I raise it even louder. ‘I could just go into your flat and tell her, you know. There’s nothing stopping me.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ said Mac calmly. ‘And you’re not a plate.’ He smiled slowly at me, like he always did when I made a brilliant joke or said something clever, and that smile broke me into a million pieces. ‘You’re not a plate.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ I muttered. ‘So what am I, then?’

&n
bsp; ‘I love you,’ said Mac, as though that explained everything in the universe and beyond.

  ‘Love is not enough,’ I said. I thought it had been but it wasn’t.

  ‘I’m sorry, Arden. You’ll never know how sorry I am. I wanted everything. I needed you. I …’ He paused. ‘Look, there’s something else you should know.’

  ‘Something else? What could be more something than this?’ I was finding it difficult to stand. I wanted to lean on something, lie down. If that staple of the drunken student, the shopping trolley, had been to hand I would have jumped in it and curled up like a baby. No, not a baby. Not a fucking baby.

  ‘The Dean knows about us.’ Mac had stepped forward and was holding me now and I was letting him or I would have fallen over, but I hated the feel of his hands on my waist. If I could have done, I would have kicked him off, like a donkey, but I couldn’t. I didn’t feel well.

  ‘What?’ I was finding it hard to focus. Mac’s beautiful, treacherous face was swimming before my sickly, devastated eyes.

  ‘The Dean has found out.’

  ‘What? How?’

  ‘He heard.’ In my drunken brain I imagined the Dean’s shuffling figure, walking sideways and listening at doorways until the swell of whispers was a squall loud enough for him to hear. His beetle belly swelling with indignation. His forefinger going to the bridge of his nose to hitch his glasses up in an ‘I knew it!’ manner. Then him marching to his office, wherever the hell that was, and standing angrily at the window like a detective in a film noir, shadows from blinds casting lines across his face. Mise en scène. It was everything.

  ‘You mean someone told him?’

  ‘Yes.’